Intel delays Calpella, won’t cut mobile prices
Intel will appease notebook OEMs by delaying a price cut on mobile parts until June, and adjusting the release date according to the rate at which stored up Montevina inventory is cleared out. Ars wrote last month about this possibility, and questioned the parentage of the OEMs involved.
Calpella is Intel’s upcoming Centrino 2 platform, involving a new processor and chipset, the successor to Montevina. Calpella—which is a Nehalem derivative with an on-die memory controller, a new northbridge and GPU on one die, with options for Clarksfield quad-core and Auburndale dual-core notebook CPUs—was originally expected in the second quarter, then delayed until summer 2009.
AMD Unveils a Server Chip Called Shanghai
The new computer chip is more versatile than a comparable one that Intel will release in a few days, giving AMD an important advantage.
Advanced Micro Devices is releasing a computer chip that could give it a much-needed boost against bigger rival Intel (INTC).
On Nov. 13, AMD (AMD) unveiled a processor, code-named Shanghai, for use in servers, the powerful computers that run corporate networks. Unlike other recent chips from AMD, Shanghai is being released on time, and it will be more versatile than a comparable chip due to be released from Intel in the coming days.
First Look: Seagate FreeAgent XTreme
Seagate’s FreeAgent XTreme Serial ATA (SATA) 300 external hard drives are being targeted at users dealing with high definition (HD) video and graphics files.
Although nominally a consumer item, the drives would also suit employees working from home with large data files not normally transferable over standard broadband connections. The drive also comes with a five-year warranty.
We looked at a 500GB model, although 640GB, 1TB and 1.5TB versions are also available.
All models come in black, have dual FireWire 400 and mini-USB data ports and an eSATA interface. The designation ‘SATA 300′ refers to maximum data throughput achievable of 300MBytes/s.
Toshiba announces 400GB external HDD
Toshiba Storage Device Division today announced its latest offering, a 400GB external drive. The drive connects via USB 2.0 and offers an 8MB buffer. The overall dimensions are 0.65 inch by 3.2 inches by 5 inches with a weight of 6oz. NTI Shadow software is preloaded, allowing automatic backup of documents and files. Shadow runs in the background and detects new or edited files, then saves them to the drive without any need for user action.
DRAM Prices Plunge 18 Percent in Two Weeks
The contract price of mainstream DRAM chips has plunged nearly 18 percent in two weeks to reach new record lows, an online clearinghouse for the chips reported Monday.
DRAM contracts for the second half of September, which are negotiated between chip vendors and PC vendors and make up about three-quarters of the DRAM market, fell to just US$1.44 per chip, according to DRAMeXchange, from $1.75 per chip in contracts for the first half of September.
Prices of mainstream chips, 1G-byte DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM chips that run at 667MHz, have been in the doldrums for over a year. DRAM makers built too many factories to compete against each other and on hopes people would take to Microsoft Windows Vista, which requires more DRAM than Windows XP, much faster than they have.
Atom 330 makes its debut
THE DUAL-CORE brother to Intel’s Atom lives and breathes as we speak. The Guru of 3D somehow landed an engineering sample from ECS and had some time to run basic benchmarks on the CPU. If you thought the original Atom was slow, then this one’s only half as slow.
The Atom 330 clocks at 1.6GHz, but with two of everything, two cores, two caches and draws just 8w. The FSB is still 533MHz (and so is the memory controller), though bears and the same weak FPU as its single-core predecessor. Naturally you get two cores, plus two logical cores do make things go along a bit faster…